Jim Crow

Jim Crow was not only a set of segregation laws but a system that organized economic dependence, regulated intimacy, and restricted African Americans’ power in public life. In the book, its history runs from the racial order built after enslavement through the policing of interracial relationships and the exclusion of Black citizens from juries; its formal decline did not end the poverty and institutional inequalities that shaped later cases.

Historical and Economic Foundations

Monroe County’s cotton wealth was built on plantations and a large enslaved population. After the Civil War, many African Americans in the Black Belt of Alabama remained dependent on white landowners as sharecroppers and tenant farmers. The Great Migration carried thousands away from the region in the 1940s, but those who stayed continued to work the land within a deeply unequal economy.

By the 1950s, small cotton farms were losing profitability. Alabama supported white landowners’ transition to timber and paper production with substantial tax incentives; thirteen of the state’s sixteen pulp and paper mills opened during that period. African Americans were largely excluded from the new industry. The end of sharecropping and Jim Crow therefore did not bring economic security: persistent unemployment and worsening poverty followed, leaving counties in the region among the poorest in the country.

Walter McMillian’s pulpwood business shows both the possibility and the limits of independence within that landscape. He borrowed to buy a power saw, tractor, and pulpwood truck, then built a solid business as the timber industry expanded. It brought little surplus money, but gave him more freedom than the unskilled jobs commonly available to poor Black residents, which often meant working for white business owners amid the racial pressures of the time. That autonomy earned respect from some people and suspicion from others, who doubted that a Black man with limited formal education could have achieved it legitimately.

Intimacy as a Site of Racial Control

The book connects Jim Crow’s public racial hierarchy to the regulation of sex and marriage. After Reconstruction, restrictive laws helped reassert white supremacy and subordinate African Americans. Anti-miscegenation statutes criminalized interracial intimacy, while the fear of relationships between Black men and white women became a lasting preoccupation in the South. The same racial-integrity framework was also used to justify the forced sterilization of poor and minority women.

The history reaches back to 1882, when Tony Pace, a Black man, and Mary Cox, a white woman, were convicted under Alabama’s racial-integrity laws and sentenced to two years in prison. The Alabama Supreme Court affirmed their convictions, treating interracial relationships as a threat to racial hierarchy and social order. The case illustrates how law translated white fears of racial mixing into punishment.

More than a century later, Walter McMillian’s relationship with Karen Kelly became a source of public suspicion. When Karen’s husband subpoenaed Walter to testify in a child-custody dispute, Walter acknowledged that he was Karen’s friend but was spared further questioning about the relationship after her lawyer objected. Even so, hostility followed him from the courthouse, and word spread. His standing shifted: people who had known him chiefly as a hardworking pulpwood man could now view him through the charged racial meaning attached to a Black man’s intimacy with a white woman.

Courts, Juries, and Political Power

The racial order also shaped who could exercise authority in criminal proceedings. In 1987, all forty elected district attorneys in Alabama were white, despite the state having sixteen majority-Black counties. Legislative arrangements preserved white majorities in judicial circuits that included majority-Black counties. Prosecutors and judges had reason to consider the growing Black electorate, but that awareness did not necessarily produce substantive change.

Jury selection remained another means of exclusion. In Deep South states, jury rolls were often drawn from voting rolls that had excluded African Americans; after the Voting Rights Act, clerks and judges could still use other methods to keep jury lists predominantly white. Requirements that jurors be deemed “intelligent and upright” were applied to exclude African Americans and women. Although the Supreme Court of the United States had ruled in Strauder v. West Virginia that excluding Black people from jury service was unconstitutional, and later rulings challenged underrepresentation in jury pools, constitutional protections did not ensure that Black citizens actually served.

Discretionary peremptory strikes made the gap especially consequential. A mid-1960s ruling prohibited racially discriminatory strikes, but the standard for proving discrimination was so demanding that no challenge succeeded for twenty years, while prosecutors continued to remove all or nearly all Black prospective jurors. In 1986, Batson v. Kentucky made challenges to discriminatory strikes more direct. It offered Black defendants a new avenue to contest exclusion, while also forcing prosecutors to find more creative ways to keep Black jurors off juries. For Walter, facing a capital trial in a county where Black residents formed a substantial share of the population, the prospect of an all-white jury was not an abstract historical issue but a source of immediate concern.

The System’s Afterlife

Jim Crow’s persistence appears in the book not as an unchanged legal code but as racial hierarchy reproduced through decisions about credibility, access, and punishment. Walter’s lawyers knew that moving his trial from Monroe County to Baldwin County would leave them with very few, if any, Black jurors. Baldwin County was more conservative and had made less progress in leaving behind Jim Crow politics than its neighbors. The change of venue distanced the jury pool from local ties to the victim, but it also heightened the danger of racial exclusion.

The courthouse itself could make that exclusion visible. During Walter’s trial, a metal detector and a police officer holding a German shepherd stood inside the courtroom entrance. The room was filled largely with older white supporters of the prosecution and the Morrison family, while Walter’s supporters had been kept outside. The arrangement made unequal access to the public proceedings tangible: one side’s supporters were admitted, while the other side had to contest its exclusion.

The book places these scenes within a longer account of racial injustice. It describes slavery and the racial terror that shaped the lives of people of color after Reconstruction as institutions that continue to be poorly understood in discussions of American justice. The historical account does not treat the end of formal Jim Crow as the end of its consequences. Instead, it traces how economic deprivation, racialized suspicion, and barriers to participation could survive the changing law and reappear in the ordinary procedures of the criminal courts.